Tivo vs. Hopper

We're thinking of getting DISH but wondering if buying the lifetime Tivo might be better than going with the Hopper. We hate subscriptions. Although being able to record 2000 hours on the Hopper is better than 75 on the Tivo, how many shows can you watch? Also the monthly fees on the Hopper plus Joey go up $12/month for a second TV. But we haven't tried either interface. Any thoughts, opinions?

TiVos aren't limited to 75 hours. The new Roamio Pro has 6 tuners and can record 475 hour of HD and over 4000 hours of SD.

If you're comparing to the Hopper then you really want to look at either the Roamio Plus or the Pro. They are identical except that the Plus has a 1TB drive (150 hours HD, 1300 SD) and the Pro has a 3TB drive. The Plus is $399 + service and the Pro is $599 + service.

Lifetime service on either box will be $499. So for a Pro with lifetime you're looking at spending $1,100 up front. But once you do there are no more monthly fees and the TiVo will retain a lot of it's value if you ever decide to upgrade or move to a different product. If you'd rather pay monthly the fee is $14.95/mo and there is a 1 year contract with a $75 early termination fee.

To expand to other rooms TiVo sells the TiVo Mini. These cost $99 and have the option of lifetime service for $149 or monthly service for $5.95/mo.

You'll have to compare those prices, plus the cost of cable in your area, to what you'd be paying Dish for a Hopper and see if it's worth it to you.

Just an important note, Tivo won't record the Satellite TV signals directly from Dish Network.

So it's a choice of OTA or Cable TV with Tivo versus DishNetwork with Hopper.

In addition, a life time subscription may be less of a deal that previously thought. The life time is for the life of that device. Unless you purchase a hardware warranty, or continue to pay for warranty service from Tivo, you'll find that when that device "dies", so does your lifetime subscription.

Besides, a number of Premiere owners, myself included, are not happy that there are several software bugs still waiting to be resolved, that maybe/maybe not fixed now that the Roamio has been released.

I personally will hold onto the Premier and hope that the issues are resolved, but I'll be a fool if I purchase a Roamio and lifetime subscription after how I've been treated.

Personally, other than the high price of the service, the hardware worked as advertised when I was on Dish. I'm glad I cut the cord and saved $80.00 per month and only do OTA TV with Netflix supplementation (which hangs after watching a show and requires that I press Tivo to return home and then launch the app again, lame!)

You're a perfect candidate for the Roamio Basic. You can get one with lifetime for $600. ($199 + $399MSD) You can then sell your current TiVo for $300-$350 and only be out of pocket $250-$300. With Roamio you get 4 tuners for OTA and a Netflix app that actually works and is not dog slow. Plus you have the option of expanding with the TiVo Mini.

The Premiere is a piece of crap, and a serious black mark on TiVo's history. If it's the only TiVo you've ever owned then I'm sorry. You picked the wrong generation to join the TiVolution. I've only had my Roamio for a couple days, but it is everything the Premiere should have been. It's fast and usable and actually capable of fulfilling TiVo's "one box" claim.

If I were you I'd sell my Premiere now while prices are still relatively high and get a Roamio. If you're still p*ssed off about it a year from now you can sell it and walk away with a profit.

In addition, a life time subscription may be less of a deal that previously thought. The life time is for the life of that device. Unless you purchase a hardware warranty, or continue to pay for warranty service from Tivo, you'll find that when that device "dies", so does your lifetime subscription.

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This has always been true. I have even had a S3 OLED lifetime die(*), but I still would always 'gamble' on lifetime subscription.. Because it virtually always pays for itself, when compared to monthly costs (and/or monthly costs of a cable DVR), amortized over several years... or resale value.

(*) I probably should have called up Tivo at the time and tried to get it fixed/discounted lifetime transfer to a new box, but at the time I wanted to try to recover the shows on the drive (which also died, but powers up -- i.e. I think it might be the controller card). i.e. it wasn't just the power supply, unfortunately.

I'd recommend the 3 year warranty from Tivo if you go the lifetime route. In 3 years, your lifetime is paid for vs going monthly, so any month of service after that is money in your pocket.

I had a Series 1, which only lasted about 4 years. My series 2 was finally retired after 6, and my HD is going on 5. I didn't pay for lifetime service until the Tivo HD, and my break even INCLUDING the box was at about the 40 month mark, so the last year and a half have been "free" vs paying monthly. And if I considered the cable company DVR, my break even was at 34 months, so almost 2 years have been "free" assuming I don't sell or use my Tivo HD once the Roamio gets here on Friday.

If you use Tivo to cut the cord, then I would apply the cable bill savings to the cost of the Tivo as well. You can probably pay off a Lifetime Tivo in less than a year with the cable bill savings alone.

one important thing to note here...
The dish hopper is advertised as though it has 6 tuners, "record up to six shows". It doesn't. It only has 3. The six shows at once is only because with "primetime anytime" enabled it uses 1 tuner to record the grouped stream of the 4 local networks, cbs, nbc, fox, abc...then the hopper splits the recordings. And they onlpy hang around for 8 days i think from the ads. So that leaves 2 other tuners available for other channels. otherwise u can only record up to 3 channels at once.

Tivo Roamio can do 4 or 6 on any channel you want. As others mentioned, they only work with cable tv now (sat providers are excluded from the requirements to provide cablecards, as they are not classified as 'cable').

We're thinking of getting DISH but wondering if buying the lifetime Tivo might be better than going with the Hopper. We hate subscriptions. Although being able to record 2000 hours on the Hopper is better than 75 on the Tivo, how many shows can you watch? Also the monthly fees on the Hopper plus Joey go up $12/month for a second TV. But we haven't tried either interface. Any thoughts, opinions?

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The DISH Hopper Joey + Slingbox was what I had been seriously considering if Tivo hadn't released the Roamio line. After all, it did win best of 2013 at CES and caused all the CBS/CNET uproar.

People I know with DISH like it. They don't use Slingbox capabilities though. No integrated Netflix is a no-no for me.

I'm glad things like the Hopper and Genie exist. I think they are finally putting some pressure on TiVo to innovate. Without them we may not have some of the features in the Roamio and the upcoming out of home streaming stuff.

I'm glad things like the Hopper and Genie exist. I think they are finally putting some pressure on TiVo to innovate. Without them we may not have some of the features in the Roamio and the upcoming out of home streaming stuff.

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Yes, their existence does mean innovation. But I think it's much more that they are putting pressure on the cable companies to allow TiVo (and themselves) to innovate. TiVo actions here have always been dictated by the cable companies - TiVo won't risk legal action by the cable companies. I remain convinced that the only reason we can stream copy-protected shows is the satellite companies did it first, and so the cable companies gave the go-ahead to TiVo to do it - the original language from the cable labs consortium pretty definitely did not allow streaming except in much more controlled circumstances than exist now.

one important thing to note here...
The dish hopper is advertised as though it has 6 tuners, "record up to six shows". It doesn't. It only has 3. The six shows at once is only because with "primetime anytime" enabled it uses 1 tuner to record the grouped stream of the 4 local networks, cbs, nbc, fox, abc...then the hopper splits the recordings. And they onlpy hang around for 8 days i think from the ads.

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I don't have/have never used a Hopper.. But based on reviews, you CAN "save" shows from the Primetime Anytime mega recording. But AFAIK, this is effectively manual.. the equivalent of season passes aren't smart enough to just realize "oh this is in PTA, rip it out afterwards".

Also, at least at one time, you couldn't save the show out of PTA with padding.. So with the common timeslot overruns, that may be an issue depending on what you watch. But at least the Engadget HD guy confirmed to me that Dish considered this a bug and it would hopefully be fixed.

Personally, even though I use Tivo and have cable, the vast majority of what I watch is network shows.. So I would actually love something like PTA. But will "make do" with a Roamio at some point.

2TB / 2000 hours = 2.4Mbps. There is no way they could do decent HD video in 2.4Mbps, so it has to be referring to SD. My new TiVo Roamio Pro with 3TB says 470 hours of HD. Which means TiVo assumes an average bitrate of about 14Mbps for HD. Even with H.264 you typically only see a 40% savings so that would still be about 8Mbps, so a 2TB drive would only hold about 550 hours of HD.

Hopper is a 2TB drive so with h264 you are getting 1000 hours of content per TB, which has to be SD. Also, if you check the reviews at Amazon, you'll find they are generally not very good.

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Apparently while the Hopper does indeed have a 2TB drive, only 1TB is available for normal recordings. The other is reserved for the primetime anytime recordings. If one doesn't use that feature, then it's effectively a three tuner 1TB box.

We currently have the hopper. It has its strong points. Primetime anytime is a nice feature. There have been many times where I forgot to record something and its had my back. The hopper will also automatically skip commercials for those primetime shows (if viewing the next day). Its got slingbox built in which is also nice.

We currently have the hopper. It has its strong points. Primetime anytime is a nice feature. There have been many times where I forgot to record something and its had my back. The hopper will also automatically skip commercials for those primetime shows (if viewing the next day). Its got slingbox built in which is also nice.